GLASS/Seaside Success Story | Hacker News Reader

GLASS/Seaside Success Story

andreas.mindclue.ch

29 pointsdhenrichs6 comments

When I used Seaside about two years ago I was fantastically productive with it. It abstracted away HTTP more than the current popular toolkits like Django and RoR by using continuations. It was also awesome to edit things live without having to recompile anything.

However... when I needed to debug something remote on a running server it was a nightmare. Because everything is based around the Squeak environment it was impossible to SSH in and poke around. The box I was on didn't have a GUI setup so I couldn't use something like VNC (better box would have helped, but still...)

So I found Seaside to be pretty awesome, except the difficult in working with a running server and the lack of docs killed it for me.

Although they are pretty slow right now, gemtools which is used with gemstone to interact with the always headless server is nice. you can use it to login and work with the smalltalk environment.

The stuff I'm using seaside for, is much easier to do when running on GLASS ( gemstone + seaside ) compared to running on squeak. I haven't used Cincom's web velocity which is also a Seaside environment, but it would be worth checking out as well.

The lack of docs is a little hard, but I've found the mailing list and irc channels very helpful ( even if you just lurk ). Is it a substitute for good documentation that exists outside the code and helps you ramp up? No. But it isn't the barren wilderness it would first appear to be.

GLASS is aimed at making multi-vm/remote-vm development easier.

GLASS uses continuations for debugging stacks from remote servers...when an error is encountered, a continuation is snapped off and stashed in an ObjectLog (a persistent collection). At the developer's leisure, she can bring up a debugger on the error stack in her development vm.

If you are debugging in a development environment you can proceed from the 'remote continuation' and the newly rendered page will show up in the browser...

If you run Seaside in a VisualWorks server, you can load the old DST packages and do remote debugging with the GUI debugger.

If your code isn't compatible with that library (it is kind of old), then you can run your server under VNC. This gives you a nice "pseudo-headless" mode but still allows you to debug and tweak with the full development environment.

Squeak has a native VNC server, so you can use the development environment, without running a full GUI desktop on the operating system. There's also a Seaside admin app that you can use to start and stop the VNC server, so you don't leave it open all the time. On a remote server it's a touch slow, but otherwise it works great.

What we do is run the RFBServer in squeak so we can connect directly to the running images on GUIless servers. This works pretty well.

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